Re: Internationalisation

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Re: Internationalisation
by ac on Tuesday 31/May/2005, @01:24

>>There always is a project participation entrance barrier.
Which is mostly in the head of the people, I found that joining a team is quite easy, and that for every type of skill there is a job available.

>>Translation should not (not?) be an easy task for average joe contributors, not require special skills such as CVS knowledge.
Translating/localizing software does not require special skills that are too hard for joe user. For example, the Dutch translation is coordinated by a cook. How hard can it be if even someone with no link to ICT, like a cook, can handle it?

>Some premature web based contribution engines such as IRMA and pootle adress the important issue.
The problem with pootle and IRMA (AFIAK) is that it does not use a translation memory. If you have a large amount of applications translated, you can use those translations to translate new apps for about 40-60% (considering simple apps). This increases the consistency between apps and reduces workload for the translators.

> However now the translation does not catch up quickly enough.
KDE is shipped with 50 languages, which is quite a lot already.
The bottleneck in translating KDE is not the skills joe contributer should have in order to use the special tools for translating, it is the knowledge of the English/Native language, and the ability to figure out how a string is used in the application. Also, translation is very time consuming- not everyone has the time to participate in a translation project.

But anyone who prefers KDE in their own language should team up with their translation team. Even small contributions, like proofreading stuff or giving comments about the translation while using KDE, are more then welcome.

You can find your team on http://i18n.kde.org

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